David Hume was born David Home on April 26, 1711,
in Edinburgh, Scotland. Hume’s father, lawyer Joseph Home, died
in 1713, and Hume’s mother, Katherine, raised
their three children alone. With his Calvinist family, young Hume
faithfully attended services in Church of Scotland, where his uncle
served as pastor. The boy’s family had a comfortable life and a
moderate income, enough to provide him with a good education. He
left home at age twelve to study law at the University of Edinburgh.
Although Hume’s earliest letters reveal that he took religion
seriously, he developed a stronger interest in philosophy and literature while
a student at Edinburgh. In 1729, Hume left
Edinburgh to pursue a self-directed education. He worked briefly
for a sugar merchant in England and left for France in 1734,
where he wrote his first book, A Treatise of Human Nature.
When he returned to Britain, he anonymously published three of the
five volumes of the Treatise: Books I and II in 1739 and
book III in 1740—a remarkable accomplishment
for a twenty-nine-year-old. Many scholars today believe that the Treatise is
Hume’s masterpiece, but it was not well received by the English
public. The book was not widely reviewed and failed to arouse the
public debate Hume hoped for.
In 1741 and 1742,
Hume published his two-volume Essays, Moral and Political,
which met with better success than the Treatise. Hume
decided that the problem with his Treatise was
its style, not its content, so he reworked it into several smaller
publications. Two of these publications became major works: An
Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and An Enquiry
Concerning the Principles of Morals. This time, Hume caused
a stir by advocating a system of morality based on utility, or usefulness,
instead of God’s authority. His newfound success encouraged him
to seek a department chair position at the University of Edinburgh,
but the town council rejected him because of his antireligious philosophy.
The new books established Hume as the founder of the moral theory
of utility and inspired the utilitarian movement, but they also
made him known as an atheist, and he was rejected from yet another
chair position at the University of Glasgow.
In 1752, Hume became a librarian
for the College of Advocates in Edinburgh, where he wrote and published
his six-volume History of England. Although it
was not a philosophical work in the strictest sense, Hume felt that History was
the next step in his philosophical evolution. He described the series
as the practical application of his ideas about politics. During
this period he also published Four Dissertations: The Natural
History of Religion, Of the Passions, Of Tragedy, Of the Standard
of Taste. These works aroused controversy in the religious
community before they became public. Early copies were passed around,
and someone of influence threatened to prosecute Hume’s publisher
if the book was distributed as it was. Hume deleted two essays and
removed some particularly offensive passages, then published the
book to moderate success. But the larger success of History
of England restored Hume’s reputation and provided him
with the income he needed to live comfortably.
In 1763, Hume left the library
and returned to the world of politics, accompanying Lord Hertford,
the British ambassador to France, as his personal secretary. Hume
was a controversial figure in England, but Enlightenment Paris received
him warmly. In 1766, Hume returned to London as under-secretary
of state, bringing along the persecuted writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Despite the generosity of his good-natured host, Rousseau eventually
grew paranoid and bitter over his enemies’ public attacks against
him, and he broke with Hume in 1767. Rousseau
wrote a public pamphlet accusing Hume of plotting against him while
he was Hume’s guest. Hume effectively cleared his own name by publishing
a response that explained the reasons for their dispute.
Another secretary appointment took Hume away from England for
a year, but in 1768, he retired to Edinburgh,
where he spent his remaining years revising his works and socializing.
He died from a painful internal disorder on April 26, 1776,
at age sixty-five. After his death, several of his unpublished works
appeared in print. The first was the short autobiography My
Own Life, in which he finally acknowledges that he had
authored the Treatise and which aroused immediate
religious controversy because of his professed happiness as an atheist.
In 1779, Hume’s Dialogues Concerning
Natural Religion appeared after being suppressed for years
by his closest friends. Again, the response was mixed. Admirers
of Hume considered it a masterful work, whereas critics railed against
its hostility to religion. In 1782, Hume’s
last two suppressed essays, Of Suicide and Of
the Immortality of the Soul, appeared to overwhelmingly
negative criticism.
Hume is widely regarded as the third and most radical
of the British empiricists, after John Locke and George Berkeley.
Like Locke and Berkeley, Hume argued that all knowledge results
from our experiences and is not received from God or innate to our
minds. This kind of empiricism led to today’s “scientific method,”
which holds that knowledge should be based on observations rather
than intuition or faith. Radical empiricism went further, arguing
that our knowledge is nothing more than the sum of our experiences.
Unlike Locke and Berkeley, Hume removed God from the equation completely
and argued forcefully against the possibility of his existence as
his contemporaries envisioned it.
Hume excelled as a moral philosopher, historian, and economist. He
was the leader of the Scottish Enlightenment, a movement that took
place in the fifty years between 1740 and 1790.
This period was a very stable one in Scottish history, free of the
civil strife and turmoil of earlier eras, and it gave rise to a
remarkable number of notable intellectuals. The French Enlightenment
had already spread throughout continental Europe and was beginning
to influence Scottish academics, including Hume. Although they shared
the French spirit, the Scottish philosophers practiced extreme skepticism
and identified more strongly with utilitarianism, which posits that
actions should be measured by their effect on the greater good of
the world, not their consequences for the individual.
Despite Hume’s nay-saying contemporaries, his theories
of the “evolution” of ethics, institutions, and social conventions
proved highly influential for later philosophers. Attention to his
works grew after the great philosopher Immanuel Kant credited Hume with
awakening him from “dogmatic slumber.”
